Abstract

The idea of space-time coding devised for multiple-antenna systems is applied to the problem of communication over a wireless relay network, a strategy called distributed space-time coding, to achieve the cooperative diversity provided by antennas of the relay nodes. In this paper, we extend the idea of distributed space-time coding to wireless relay networks with multiple-antenna nodes and fading channels. We show that for a wireless relay network with antennas at the transmit node, antennas at the receive node, and a total of antennas at all the relay nodes, provided that the coherence interval is long enough, the high SNR pairwise error probability (PEP) behaves as if and if , where is the total power consumed by the network. Therefore, for the case of , distributed space-time coding achieves the maximal diversity. For the case of , the penalty is a factor of which, compared to , becomes negligible when is very high.

Copyright

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.